THROUGHOUT Lionel Shriver’s celebrated novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, the protagonist is clear-headed about her son’s pathological behaviour that culminates in mass murder.

Equally clear that his teachers are wrong about Kevin’s academic work being poor, she cites from his assignment the following example of his insightfulness: “In school we study great African-Americans for a whole month ... Last year we studied the same

African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Next year we will study the same African-American Americans during African-American Month.”

Clever Kevin indeed shows through his very style the dreary repetitiousness of such an annual exercise, the paucity of great subjects to study and, by his disingenuous word order, the dull tautology of black America’s chosen appellation. The echo of a faux anti-racist sigh is audible: we are all simply Americans.

Need one ask why educated folk like Kevin’s cosmopolitan mama so wilfully misunderstand history and choose to believe that it is about a few great figures endlessly circulated through box-ticking school curricula?

Black History Month (BMH), rather than being about black people simply banging on about their oppression and exclusion, is crucially about history, and necessarily draws attention to historiography, which is to say how history is written.

Thus a vast array of questions is raised, questions that are pertinent to all sectors of society. Who decides what persons and events constitute history, and what has been excluded? What are the criteria and ideologies that underpin the writing of history? How have people been constructed through historical texts?

In that sense Black History Month ought to make us aware about crucial aspects of the culture, needle at collective amnesia, stop us in our complacent stride – in other words, no bad thing for a nation. In a real sense then, BHM is a misnomer, speaking as it ought – and in sensible institutions does – to the interrelatedness of human histories: black history is of course also white history, and vice-versa. It goes without saying that the powerless have little to do with the writing of history, which goes some way towards explaining why Kevin is subjected to a slender curriculum.

Ever since its inception in England in the 1980s, Black History Month has been marked by controversy and distortions. Dismissive black voices lament the fact that it is limited to a month, that it is not integrated into mainstream history, or that it cannot make reparations for racial conflict and inequalities – as if that were at stake.

Voices like Kevin’s respond scathingly to celebrations of “the best of black culture”, and the cacophony reaches its shrillest falsetto in the free-spirited

anti-racists whose insights stretch beyond populist political correctness, and who disingenuously propose that, all races being equal, the focus on any one race is unjust.

The unfortunate focus on icons and individual achievements has largely been established by the BHM movement itself, but this is not so surprising given historical denigration.

Francis Williams, the 18th century Jamaican scholar and poet, for instance, was a prime candidate for recovery, for it was the great David Hume, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, who claimed that he was most likely admired “for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly”. After all, wrote Hume, “there never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white”. Small wonder that the month aims to foster positive black identity.

Recently some English councils sought to rename it Diversity Month, as if social diversity were not a given (much as Kwame Appiah says of cultural membership: “A primary good only in the same uninteresting sense as oxygen; you can’t not have it”).

Far from Diversity Month broadening the scope, it would surely dilute the crucial concern with historiography and historical contexts, the focus of which is necessarily far-reaching as it initiates conversations across space and time and boundaries of identity.

Take, for example, the case of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, the first life-story of a black female slave to be published in London in 1831. Equally as interesting as the iconic figure of Mary Prince and her harrowing account of being a slave is the context of the work’s production and reception, which takes us beyond London and the West Indies to Scotland and South Africa. Prince escaped from her master, John Wood, whom she’d accompanied to London; she appealed to the Anti-Slavery Society and was taken in as a domestic worker by its secretary, Thomas Pringle. (Pringle, a Scottish 1820 settler known in South Africa as Father of South African Poetry, had cut his humanitarian teeth on the savage practices against imported slaves and native peoples alike in the Cape.)

He arranged for Prince to dictate her story to Susannah Strickland, resulting in a highly mediated text in which the slave woman’s sexual history was redacted to suit the abolitionist cause.

It misfired. Enter James MacQueen, strident champion of the pro-slavery lobby, editor of the Glasgow Courier, and contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine where he had previously written on the innate sexual licentiousness of African women.

Outraged by The History he questioned its veracity, defended slavers, called Prince a lying prostitute and insinuated that Pringle was having a sexual relationship with her. Pringle’s libel suit against Blackwood’s was successful, but he was in turn sued by John Wood who claimed that Prince’s ill-treatment was exaggerated, and pointed to an inconsistency in her story about her own sexual conduct.

These scandals reverberated in the Eastern Cape, where Scottish settler Andrew Geddes Bain satirised and indigenised the Prince-Pringle story to show how British humanitarians were duped by the native Khoe-khoe people (Hottentots to European colonists). Mary Prince, then, cannot simply be seen in terms of individual achievement; her story does not speak of “the best of black culture”; rather, it intersects with other histories and with issues in life-writing.

It is important that BHM is an institution initiated by black people who, since its inception in the USA some 40 years ago, have themselves orchestrated and curated events and materials for its promotion.

Decades of awareness campaigns have paid dividends and made their mark on the wider society. Historian Tom Devine’s ground-breaking work on empire has been influential in debunking myths and establishing a wider perspective on the spoils of slavery.

In 2001 Scotland adopted Black History Month, and notable events have followed. To mention only a couple: during the Commonwealth Games celebrations, Louise Welsh and Jude Barber set up the successful Empire Café in the Briggait where diasporic black history and culture was explored in a variety of forms. Stephen Mullen’s It Wisnae Us uncovered the links between slavery and Glasgow’s architectural heritage, and so expanded the scope of Black History Month.

Glasgow today is indeed very different from the city I came to in 1988. Then, ironically, its role in the history of slavery was visible only in its effacement. In the People’s Palace, the Glassford family portrait perfectly represented an absence through the smudged effacement of his trophy black slave.

Midst unexplained paraphernalia from the sugar and tobacco industries, one could have been forgiven for thinking that these tropical crops were home grown. Nowadays public discourse ensures that most schoolgirls know of Glasgow’s role as the second city of empire.

Were African-American writer Alice Walker ever to visit again and venture to mention her Scottish ancestry, would she again have to endure the uncivil response of her well-meaning audience – laughter? Could it be that people knew nothing of the years between the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and abolition of slavery itself (1838) when owners, so brutalized by the institution, had no choice but to copulate with slave women to increase their stock?

Let us cherish the notion that Black History Month may well one day become redundant.